This specification relates to data processing techniques such as servicing requests for content.
The Internet enables access to a wide variety of resources. For example, video, audio, webpages directed to particular subject matter, news articles, images, and other resources are accessible over the Internet. The wide variety of resources that are accessible over the Internet has enabled opportunities for advertisers to provide targeted advertisements with the resources. For example, an advertisement can be targeted for presentation with resources directed to subject matter to which the advertisement is relevant and to users that are members of a target audience for the advertisement.
Targeting criteria can be associated with an advertisement to facilitate targeting of the advertisement to users that are members of the target audience for the advertisement. For example, an advertisement for basketballs being sold by a sporting goods store can be associated with the targeting keyword “basketball” and demographic targeting criteria specifying that the advertisement is to be presented to users that are identified to be between 12 and 25 years of age. In turn, when a user satisfying the demographic targeting criteria requests a search results webpage including search results for the search query “basketball,” the advertisement can be presented with the search results page. Similarly, the advertisement can be presented with another resource that is relevant to targeting keywords associated with the advertisement and requested by a user that satisfies the demographic targeting criteria.
There are many different targeting criteria that an advertiser can associate with an advertisement for targeting the advertisement. Typically, as an advertiser provides more specific targeting criteria, the precision with which an advertisement is presented to a target audience increases. However, as the specificity of the targeting criteria increases the reach of the advertisement is reduced because fewer users will match the targeting criteria specified by the advertiser.
To assist advertisers in determining which targeting criteria to associate with their advertisements, advertising systems may provide performance estimates for the advertisement based on targeting criteria specified by the advertisers. For example, an advertiser can select different combinations of targeting criteria for the advertisement and receive an indication of a number of impressions that the advertisement will likely receive if targeted according to the targeting criteria. However, as the data used to compute the performance estimates increases, the time required to compute performance estimates can increase. Therefore, the ability to provide the performance estimates to advertisers in a real-time interactive system may be reduced.